After returning from a two-week vacation in Thailand, I'm back to work answering listener questions.  On today's episode I talk about some miscellaneous stats and cover some listener questions including:

What do the successful 2% do that the other 98% don't?
Do you deal with "active" real estate investments?
How should I evaluate a property's cash-flow and rates of return?
Are there more risks with pre-construction properties?

Enjoy the show!

If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to listen to Leveraging Your Cash, Equity and Time – Keith Weinhold.

Enjoy the show!

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Ask Marco - Pre-Construction Risks, Evaluating Cash-Flow and Rates of Return
Today, I'm actually going to be your guest too. You have me on both ends. Today I want to talk about some listener questions that we've been getting. I appreciate you sending in your questions from week to week. We do try and cover them live with you on the phone or via email, but once in a while, I'll post some of those out and cover them here on the podcast episodes.

First, I just want to let you know that I just got back from Thailand. In fact, I'm running on coffee at this point. I don't think I've slept in the last 48 hours because it's about 22 hours of travel. Yesterday, I couldn't sleep at all because of the time change. I'm effectively running on about 48 hours here of sleep deprivation. But the trip to Thailand was absolutely amazing. It's a beautiful country. The hospitality is amazing. We were able to eat some great food, ride and feed elephants, go kayaking in the caves, snorkel, go on some river raft rides. The people there are just unbelievably friendly and patient and courteous. It's a different culture, but it is something that is worth experiencing if you haven't been there.

Pre-Construction Risks: I look at different cities and markets from an economic perspective.

What was amazing, and I'm always looking at these different cities and markets in a different light. I always look at it from an economic perspective. I look at the businesses and I try to think about what the opportunities are there and what the restrictions are. This is true for any economy, not just Thailand. We had several tours and I asked our tour guide what the average annual income is of a person in Thailand. The range is pretty diverse. His comments were that the average Thai person makes 120,000 Thai Baht. To translate that into US dollars, 120,000 actually works out to be $3500 per year, not per month, $3500 US per year. That's according to our tour guide. I did a Google search on the same thing and I wanted to find out how much they make according to some analysis or reports online. What I was able to find was about half of that.

It's amazing that these people really just live day-to-day, hand to mouth. They make just enough to survive to pay for their accommodation and food. They really don't have disposable money to spend on things like nice cars or jewelry or trips. They are just hand to mouth, but they're very happy. I won't say they're all happy, but they are satisfied.

I talked to and met a lot of Thai people, many of which didn't speak much if any English. Everybody was just very courteous. We had a great time. We were there for two weeks. I apologize that I never had a podcast episode out last week. Obviously, that's the reason why. In fact, I purposely chose not to bring my laptop with me. I did bring my iPhone just to keep up on some email, which I checked late at night or first thing in the morning. For the most part, I was disconnected and unplugged from the world for most of the day.